Striving for sustainability in school
I’ve been working towards this goal for nearly 16 years but it’s always been on the backburner. With the backing of a supportive headteacher and an incredible group of young people working alongside me we are finally starting to make real progress in sustainability and climate literacy at our state secondary school in the south west of England. I’d like to share the journey we’ve been on and our current and future visions and goals.
Chew Valley School launched its Learn to Lead initiative in 2005, the year before I joined the school as an NQT geography teacher. The inspiration for this came from a small group of students who put together a team to create a memorial garden for a much loved science teacher Pete Brown. Having seen the impact this process had on the young people, Liz Shuttleworth (Head of geography) researched and introduced this inspiring programme, which gives agency to young people by training them as leaders to run teams in areas important to them. The subsequent teams that the students have created have been wide, varied and wonderful; chicken team, shelter team, toilet team, fundraising team, equalities team, BLM team, women’s rights team, lego robotics team, the list goes on! Some have stood the test of time while others have come and gone. It’s been great to watch how these teams have evolved and reflected what’s important to young people and society. Environmentalism has always been a key focus for many of these teams and collectively, over the years these young people have achieved a lot; working with the canteen to limit and reduce plastic waste was one such positive achievement.
In 2017, the ‘Planet over plastics’ team organised for the Bristol-based charity City to Sea to come in and deliver assemblies to every child in the school. It felt like a pivotal moment for our school as it highlighed the sheer extent of the environmental issue of plastic waste. The young people were empowered and ready to take real action.
The Climate Action Team was born soon after this and has gone from strength to strength. Initially set up by by sisters in Year 7 and Year 11 it now has an active membership of 25 and has had huge positive change in our school and local community.
In the first few years of action, the team achieved among others, the following:
- implementation of climate friendly travel and trip guidelines for the whole school
- staff and sixth form clothes swaps
- planting 108 trees on school site
- attendance to multiple university conferences, workshops and inter-school collaboration projects
- attendance at the ‘Fridays for future’ school strike for climate
- BBC Breakfast live team interview
- held a climate awareness based film festival
- attended community events to talk about our work
- whole school ‘lights off’ campaign
While the team has worked in many areas, I’d like to focus on our recent work with the UN and the subsequent change in governance for our school. Having read online about the UN ‘climate change teacher’ qualification we applied to the Educcate Global Programme for a funded place. We were succesful and joined Melanie Harwood on this exciting programme. Over a 4 month period, 5 members of staff completed detailed climate literacy online training and the whole school took part in subsequent inset traning. Following this, the students and their families took part in ‘carbon buster challenges’. The first of which was to change to a green energy provider (38 families made the change) and the second was to reduce meat consumption by swapping to a vegetarian or vegan meal. What a buzz this created! Engaging the whole school body in positive, simple-to-achieve challenges was fantastic. The projects enabled us to achieve our Bronze Award with Educcate Global.
The school achieving this award came at a crucial time as it coincided with our Multi Academy Trust, Lighthouse School Partnership setting out a target of climate neutrality by 2035 and the publication of the government’s draft strategy on sustainability and climate change in places of education. This strategy focuses on 5 areas: Climate Education, Green Skills and Careers, Estate, Operations and supply and Data.
These three strands have given a new drive and energy to the area of sustainability and climate literacy. In order to enable further work and progress to be made in this area, our school (as following the model of Churston Ferrers School in Torbay) created a TLR position for the role of Sustainability and Climate Literacy Lead Teacher.
With this new investment and focus into this area, I’m so excited to see what else we can achieve as a school in our strive to achieve sustainability. Our next projects involve embarking on the UN silver award and collaborating with our partner schools in LSP to work towards our 2035 target. Please do keep reading our updates and get in touch if you want to know more.